


Half-Sick of Shadows

by SemicircleJones



Category: Notre-Dame de Paris | The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alchemy, Bacchanalian Feasts, Creepy Claude Frollo, F/M, Inspired by Notre-Dame de Paris | The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Internal Conflict, Love/Hate, Obsession, One-Sided Attraction, Pining, Poetry, Purple Prose, Religious Guilt, Sexual Tension, Surreal, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:09:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23708155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SemicircleJones/pseuds/SemicircleJones
Summary: Claude Frollo is a monk who has spent his entire life dedicated to study and worship at the cathedral of Notre Dame. However, after a lifetime of prudence his neglected passions have led him to pine for the irrational; an experience that can only be felt to be understood. After delving into alchemy and magic, his prayers are seemingly answered in the form of a dancing gypsy girl, but he soon finds that the feelings she imparts in him are too strong to bear, and now his only goal is to find a way to put an end to this intolerable longing.
Relationships: Esméralda | Esmeralda/Claude Frollo
Comments: 3
Kudos: 32





	Half-Sick of Shadows

_“If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot comprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God.”_

Claude Frollo jerks the book closed, filled with the creeping sense that what he reads is heresy; and yet it is too late, for the words seem to fill and rearrange in his mind where the page once held them. The monk now stares into his searingly clean room, illuminated by its thousands of tidy books, empty phials and insect carcasses, all labeled neatly into rows alongside alembics and medical instruments. His hand pulses against the old wooden desk as a neurotic tremor passes through it. 

He laments with great passion his wasted years; all these hours of studying, years of his life spent in the monastery and its libraries and still he knew nothing about the universe, he could know nothing. What had he experienced of the scenes inscribed on those lines of scripture he had read and re-read? The troubled monk and scholar had calculated and imagined all the beauty of god and his myriad forms with such intensity, visions rewritten and overlapping over the years, decades of them; but still, the object of his mind was without physicality, transient and inconsistent. He wanted nothing more than to hold in the center of his trembling palm, the divine proof of his imagination.

As Frollo grew older, gaps opened up in his science, and they did in his heart as well. His obsession with quantifying the divine had led him so far as to dabble in superstition and alchemy, and he found himself in constant conflict with the discipline his faith and position demanded. His obsessive nature permeated nearly every aspect of his life, and this psychological predisposition is something he would come to refer to as Fate. 

Frollo recalled a line from the passage he had been reading;  _ Rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. _

With measured movements, he opens the book again, marking the page.  _ But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?” _

At once he began to perceive Notre Dame, the Paris cathedral which he had dedicated the last twenty years of study and worship to, as a kind of prison which trapped him in its maze of impossibly complex relief carvings, hidden altars and his own brutal self awareness. He longed for something magical, something unexplainable, something which could only be felt to be understood. Something to stir his weakened senses to revelation, proof of his desire made flesh. 

Visions of the ecstatic songs of Hildegard von Bingen, the wonder that the Flammarion Engraving wrought, mingled with Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa circled viciously within his mind and swelled to a crescendo; he fumbled for his notebook amidst his yellowed papers. In the beginning was the word. He takes a moment to scribble into his unkempt diary,

_ “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” _

Writing feverishly, Frollo fancied himself as the poor, doomed Dr. Faustus as he mumbled with a melancholic laugh, “Philosophy is odious and obscure, both law and physics are for petty wits. ‘Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me!” 

Hunched over his desk like a hungry dog over a bone, a daemonic excitement rises in the wary alchemist. As he devours these words, he can feel them threatening to sever the only thread of reason tying together his weakening clerical devotion, much to his dismay. All his life he had thought that by remaining pure, by worshipping the light and welcoming all that would abase him would bring him closer to his comprehension of God. Why, then, was his knowledge incomplete? 

_ Make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity.  _

He feverishly draws out the symbol onto a page in his notebook, almost breaking his pencil in the process. Too much a dreamer to give it a second thought, he opens his mouth to speak the incantation it spells, but pauses. Like Faust hesitating before drinking his fatal “cup of crystal, clear”, so the fevered scholar trembled to find his voice, afraid of losing his faith to the answers this questionable trance promised to reveal, and the hubris it suggested. 

“This greater life, this godlike bliss! 

You, but a worm, have you earned this? 

Choosing to turn your back 

On all Earth’s lovely Sun might promise! 

Let me dare to throw those gates open, 

That other men go creeping by! 

Now is the time, to prove through action 

Man’s dignity may rise divinely high, 

Never trembling at that void where, 

Imagination damns itself to pain 

Striving toward the passage there 

Round whose mouth all Hell’s fires flame; 

Choose to take that step, happy to go 

Where danger lies, where Nothingness may flow...” 

As he reads the passage, Frollo reaches down to ever-so-slightly tighten the cilice he keeps around the length of his thigh — just enough so that the silvery garter is ringed by a flower of blood growing from each of its pointed ends. 

__

__

Then, left in silence, he began to hear a sound. Slowly at first, as if it had been there for a long time but he had only now become conscious of it, he caught a glossy beating of spheres penetrating the eerie silence that surrounded the room which before housed only the sound of his voice and his breathing, heavy and weak. But there was something else breathing out there, just beyond the walls of his cell. With panic, he crumpled the page under a sweaty palm, and paused as he heard a whistle of wind outside his cathedral window. With a sigh of relief he continued reading. 

But there was a new sound. A shaking, a shivering of metal. He is started with fear, but it subsides into intrigue as the sound forms a rhythm, not unlike music, and grows louder with every toss. It was the sound of a tamborine.

Ignoring the sound, the spirited monk continues to read, but as soon as his concentration lands, it is carried away again by the sound of that mantic rattle. Soon, the struggle to read a single line becomes impossible. His resistance goes limp under the changeling echo of that tamborine, its colors of sound, its fickle, fluid moods more of a warning than an invitation. Yet he follows, first with his eyes, then with his feet, out of the cathedral and into the city square, towards the source of the metallic gyrations.

As he approaches the sound, the crowd seems to fall away where there stands a figure; a woman, though he could not be sure even of that, coiling through an eruption of green flames which burn, fizzle and die into curtains of smoke. The waves of heat begin slowly at first, then all at once, to curl up his spine, throwing fresh sparks with every leap of her bare feet and lacing of her toes. 

Beneath her, Frollo could make out the shape of a goat, caught in her flurry of movement, its dappled coat shining mysteriously in the Chthonic glow as it rang around her in methodical circles. A flash of gold jewelry spins wildly from her ankle even as she stands still balanced on one arched foot, anticipating her next effortless movement as if waiting, possessed, for a sign from the fire behind her. 

But every look she throws to him is a biting pain; what a burn! Her smile is flushed the color of wine, of fruit overripe and leaking intoxicating poison; but sickly sweet, because he feels she dances for him, even if only to lure him into a trap. How like a vapor she was, dancing along the air, a silhouette cast against and lit aflame by unholy lights, an undercurrent of living fire writhing under him then slipping out of reach, intangible, uncontrollable; resurfacing further and further but brighter each time like a hungry vision swept to life by desert sands. 

Her dark rimmed eyes with their thick, arched brows cradle the color of the river styx and the current of a swirling swamp in hell which bubbles with the half-liquid bodies of damned lustful souls. Every look, every smile and breath which flew towards him was hopelessly contrived, for when the colored veils which swept around her painted eyes lifted, they revealed a gaze that looked on him with fear and disgust. Yet he pursued, gleefully aware that he was a fool for doing so, much to his horror. Reeling in her spell and all its promised secrets, he felt he would follow this stranger into madness, into death.

How frigid and still he was compared to her, a spindly, bloodless homunculus chasing this dancing creature with only his eyes. He could not survive each torturously slow century of her moving. The sound of a flute curves through him as her ringed torso unwinds from around her swathes of skirts as if she were emerging from them, her thin waist struggling towards the flaring, fleshy ripeness of her chest and exposed shoulders. He felt as if the color of his skin and hair had been choked out and fed to her; as if every poor spasm of his heart funneled the red from his mouth into her own so that while her spiced lips flushed with rosy color, his drained whiter yet. 

All his life, Frollo had struggled to remain unsullied, untouched, severing himself from the mountain which he came and working to carve away for himself a smooth face amongst gritty rock, separate and alone. Though he was full of still, limpid light, he wavered, and felt a pleasure in losing his careful balance to fall into stirring, impure depths, to allow the blood to reach his grey-white skin and feel it begin to run through and fill his ghost of a form. 

He seemed to desire this fall from heaven, looking down, down, into a bottomless blackness, feeling the dark power moving inside him like an ocean current, his self-will, once so strong, now a stranger to the greater monster inside him; deep sea wonder, dread night monarch astir in its cave, moving him slowly towards his involuntary tumble with fate. His long-cultivated principle of individuation was being lulled into a half-dissolved sleep, losing to the swirling, faceless cosmos all around him. 

But something in the sorry monk stayed rooted, twisted to its place; it was the waning will of his struggling ego, whose careful constructs are being blown apart layer by layer by the sublime hand of a wind which bursts from soil rather than sky. Why, still, did he resist? This must have been what he desired to understand. But, then, why did she look at him with such horror, with such disgust? Why was he unwelcome in her presence? He could feel the sinuous current wind around him like a trap, and yet he was spurred on by the secrets his body hid from his mind. 

Even as it seemed Frollo could take no more, the music continued moving without pause, with a pattern whose order is present but unconscious. As she twists and unravels, she reveals a fluttering youth, her ripe shoulder seeming to deepen its browned shade in the sun and growing paler under the fire’s light, while her black curls wind around each other as they follow her through space like snakes grappling around a staff. Dark as grape vines plucked from the underworld, her curls drip their potent wine all around her perfumed neck. 

The force of her movements with each fall of the drumming tamborine crashed against him with the clapping rhythm of storming waves, and he imagined her fingers on his neck, a tickling foam inching over the edge of a rigid shore. A pang of enveloping passion swells in him as his ghost seems to leave his body to join her, not in dance, but in retaliation. In his mind, he grabs her, twisting her airy limbs around her arching back with an iron grip, to watch this daughter of Egypt struggle like a lovely butterfly whose wings are clipped and becomes unrecognizable from any maggot. Then he could inflict a little of himself onto her, only then could they experience what it is to be one another. To be suffocated by passion, to struggle for release. 

He wishes more than anything to capture the multi-colored vapors which seize and soften all around her swift silhouette and trap them, restricting her to one of his thin glass phials, and lessen her by making her measurable. To keep for himself the extracted essence of her ever-expanding, fertile chaos, and harvest every shivering drop. 

All the while, she continued to smile and dance without purpose, lavishing in physical existence alone, a creature of starlight and childish wonder. She moved like a dim imitation of the sun whose illusions of shadow and flame arch, dip, expand and shrink from within the lining of its own dark shell like a hellish scream made manifest. 

Then, she, like a bacchante of Mount Maenalus, began to sing; her wavering voice rose from the earth, first in disjointed notes, then falling together into a sort of organized chaos. Under the thrumming disc of her tambourine song, the salamander’s voice took on a sonorous quality, mingled with shrill, sibilant notes. Softly undulating octaves were accented by a language both ancient and colloquial, giving way to a succession of bursting melodies and unexpected cadences becoming words and creating images, amidst runs and trills, through sound alone. She seemed to sing only out of pure enjoyment, her mouth flushed full of blossoming color as she breathed to life every cryptic note while her eyes wandered; skimming the movements of an unseen host. With every breath, she gave to the air a taste of that inner voice which hummed like a dark corona of sound all round her skull, crowning her a madwoman one moment and a queen the next.

Her charmingly asymmetrical eyes darted about with near-sighted blurriness, her expressions conforming to each line like an ever-changing mask; and in the moment she sang them she possessed those words merely. As the music fell back from its plateau and into stiller depths, her eyelids sank over her muddy, moony eyes with the dim wonder of a child. Then they landed on his wild gaze, now downcast, which seemed to burn with bulging vitality from out his withered body. He threw a few ashamed glances to the throbbing brain that watched him through those wide, feathered slits with lucid scrutiny. They condemned him mercilessly; a searing white mirror of unwelcome truth. 

He perceived himself at once in her presence as some polymeric beast, an inflated white spider swollen with stolen blood; all ape and no substance. A flood of many words came into his mind, concentrated in a slowly growing swell of lust that bubbled up, ironically and horribly, from the cobblestone cracks beneath him. 

_ If you can rearrange the words the world is made of, you can make reality whatever you wish.  _

The exclamation slithered from his lips with a chilling throb which choked on every letter, as he felt himself struggling to regain his will; 

“Sacrilege! Profanation!” Then quieter, as if to himself alone; “there is sorcery in this.”

The young dancing girl paused and seemed human again as she shivered at these words, and the crowd, feeding on the tension, roared for more. He could hear their jeering whispers float around him indistinctly;

“What is he on about?”

“It’s that mad monk who practices magic. I wonder why the archdeacon lets him stay in the convent when everyone knows he can’t be trusted.”

“I’ve never seen him outside Notre Dame, but I’ve glimpsed him staring out from his dark tower with those twisted eyes. I hear the other monks won’t go near him.”

Then the gypsy girl turned to him with mischievous pleasure and, fueled by a renewed pride, her words followed suit.

“This sorcery, then, which divine simplicity itself, is not for you moderns, you children of over-contemplation. It works only evil in you.”

With turbulence masked as decisiveness he cried,“Will you be gone, you gypsy grasshopper? You do not deserve to stand in the shadow of this holy place.” 

But her stirring, insolent words seemed to draw on the ever-growing spark of fear and determination within him, which rallied for what he saw as a fight to restore sovereign possession of his very soul. As he wrestled internally, the small goat watched him from behind her, its moist black eyes bulging and unreadable.

She began to laugh nymphishly. “Be gone? Under my feet violets, roses and myrtles spring up every hour- But their fragrance does not agree with you- you regard the scent of life as if it were a symptom of decay. Stay immured in your northern fogs and Christian incense; let us pagans simmer under the debris, beneath the lava; do not uproot us.”

The sound of her voice, almost accusatory, faded behind the twanging, clashing bells of which poured from the heart of the cathedral. The warmth of the evening sun was faltering its grip on the Parisian square. Ringing out from on high, the silvery bells, cold and clear as moonlight, slowly dried away the fae flicker of the dancing girl’s tambourine. 

Her gaze skimmed the crowd, resting on his for a moment. He strained towards her, unforgivable desire mingling with fear and awe as he watched her disappear into the crowd, slithering through the tangle of limbs, her face scattering among a thousand faces and leaving his alone and red with vengeful shame. 

Feeling sick at heart, the burgeoning alchemist vaulted the narrow steps of the cathedral and into his towering cloister, shivering in the cold, dry air compressed between its sturdy walls. 

His blood alive and jumping fire into the sagging corridor, he longed to stretch himself higher, higher than the tall, screeching belltower and its gilded dome-- if only to further his proximity from the memory of that bacchanalia which raged on still in his mind, beneath the shadows of the cathedral's stone feet. And yet, her song and its words reached even the heights he cradled himself into, and her dance burned beneath his eyelids, hot as searing pincers against his dizzy, hollowed head.

The spiked cilice belt that he had wound around his thigh earlier that morning now cut into his flesh as he moved hurriedly across the stairs; and all the while his heart wilted and fell through his closed fingers, where he had kept it prisoner all these years. Yes, he had it clenched tightly enough to keep its convulsions tight and short-lived — but now it spasmed wildly, so that each writhing echo of blood resonated with a stinging cry of penitence, an ecstasy of pain which swallowed each breath in its wake. 

To have every mark of his sin visibly and tangibly manifested by that barbed ring made every step lighter as he climbed the dark maze of stone arches which snaked towards his numerary tower. He was seething on the edge of an incredible state of longing; and this longing — to have every pain of the body sublimated in service to the divine, so that his flesh would degrade while his soul grew in substance — became a thirst for total annihilation. 

But when he reached the cellar door, he found himself safely immured by its spartan furnishings and its single ovular window, illuminating his desk and its swell of irremissible contents with a pale, glacial light. Moved by the urgent chill of wind blowing through the still opened window, Frollo began to undo his robes to pull on the metal wire, digging it a notch deeper into his flesh. 

The agony is purifying, as if every ache had been somehow transfigured from the realm of mind into matter by the act alone. Beads of blood rise from within to spill over in thick wells like a spastic disclosure of lust— and he reminds himself that the life of all flesh is its blood. But it would take much more of it to rival the weight of his transgressions. 

_ “Castigo Corpus Meum…” _

The prayer hangs in the chilled air with the sharp quiver of breath that follows. In this moment of empty hunger he desired a service to the divine greater than was capable of him on Earth. 

Yet the words the gypsy sang and the images they wrought continued to tunnel through his mind, images of opposites merging into one, Daphne fleeing from Apollo. He saw clearly now, the chaos which swelled within the drawers behind the orderly facade of a monk’s stiff cloister, and how they contrasted, yet with a strange likeness-- to the mysterious order which brought forth the words which lingered still from the long vanished chaos of the gypsy’s music. 

He had spent his life between these four walls, he had sworn himself to knowledge, yet there seemed to be an expanse, ever-reaching, behind the monk’s stiffened features, a space; broad, empty, infinite, that the thin walls of the cathedral and his skin, weaker yet, could hardly narrow into hard-pointed words. How she moved in perfect mindless tune to God, while he struggled even to hear his music! 

Visions of Daphne and Apollo swam in the darkness like liquid ghosts skipping through the cramped study, lit only by the deep yellow flicker of a waning candle. Daphne fled, like a forgetful thought playing at the surface of the monk’s own consciousness; eerie, wordless, a fact of nature evading definition. A most acrobatically mischievous muse, always playing in sands just out of reach of Apollo's grasping tide. Maybe she would dip her ankles into the sweeping glass shallows that sunlit Apollo strained towards her, stinging her naked feet a fiery gold as she made ripples in his lapping, suckering pull. He foamed at the edges with every splash and release as he grabbed at the false reflection her stirring white waters cast towards him. 

Focusing his mind between them and within them, Frollo found there was a place that was meaningful, a place of creation and renewal. A place where bitter-savored blood made him glad, glad as gardens met with the showers of God to open their buds, growing into thousand-petaled roses, filling infinity. Ceasing to be separate beings, there was something there, between the clashing gods, which was trembling to life… 

He pulled himself from this retinal circus, the images being met with resistance by his own conscience. Why had she appeared to him, then disappeared, like an ineffable vision, and to where did her song lead? He recalled his desire for something which could only be felt to be understood. Was this the answer to his morbid dissatisfaction, his philosophical pining? He was disturbed and intrigued still by the memory of her eyes sweeping past him, knowingly, yet filled with disgust. To her he must seem ridiculous in his idleness, entertained by mere shadows of reality. She must have been leading him towards something, yes, a key to the completion of the Great Work, his understanding of God and its dual forms. 

As his eyes wandered from the page, they caught a spider lurching towards its prey on a transparent web which encircled the corner of his room, its deadly architecture revealed by a flash of moonlight. He had never noticed it before. It was the only living insect in the room, surrounded by a colorful array of moths and butterfly's wings tacked carelessly to the walls, alongside the skulls of various animals, caged birds and rats the monk used as reference when sketching out his illuminations. He likened the room to a physical manifestation of his own mind, scattered with the words of his thoughts and the objects of his fancy; and the comparison was more right than he knew, for his corridor alone was lit within the intricate building. The rest of its layers and passages, along with those who stirred within them, remained unseen and unknown to him by night. 

All in his little, lighted room was still, save for the death throes of the struggling fly who before long went limp and submitted to the snare and its captor. The spider had designed its web to snatch and devour every buzzing creature that flew towards the window, and it sucked away at the fly's mangled form mindlessly. As the monk became conscious of the microcosm which stirred within the workings of his little cell, his thoughts grew wider and circled back towards his own meeting with the dancing girl, and the workings of madness stirred in him.

He began to understand her song, her riddle and her eyes, which attracted him even as they were brimming with aversion. He claimed to himself that it was all a distraction; a temptation-- and she, a snake in the grass. A warning against his dabbling in hermeticism and its artful deceptions, or a sign to pursue it? No, to him, she must be a perversion of his desire for knowledge, an ecstasy of magic and archaic madness that lingered in the further reaches of his disciplined mind. Yes, a threat that could very well undo him.

Restlessness overtook the monk, and he threw himself from his desk, flying towards the edge of the cathedral window and thrusting it open with a blast of freezing air, to crawl into the space behind it on the roof. 

Standing hidden behind a screen of gargoyles, the monk looked from above his hooked, beak-like nose with predatory alertness over the city square, as a hawk might watch for the stir of its prey. He wanted answers, but most of all, he wanted to mend this severing she had wrought in the ourobouric circle he had kept himself encased safely in all these years, pure and without corrupting influence. 

Even if it was fate, he didn’t want to lose himself to it; strangely enough, he desired to keep his ego intact despite its frequent miseries. Like a fury, her song had amplified his inner monologue to a screeching pitch, made him so aware of himself, his separateness. As Frollo looked out over the square from on high, he resembled a kind of statue, a guardian angel of the cathedral, not unlike the gargoyles; but instead of radiating a calm resilience, his black eyes tunneled inwards, neutralizing any penetrating rays of foreign light. 

As he watched, he began to notice the townspeople of Paris shift and tumble drunkenly in the lamplights beneath him, fancying them as predestined flies meandering through a model town. Though he stood far above them, he lamented how they were just as out of his reach as he was theirs, long had he lived apart from them. The wind blew harshly that night, but the monk marked every movement beneath him, desiring to find that dancing girl, the spider among them. He played with the thought that he would catch her first, trap and keep her in a jar on his wall alongside his collection of limp, decorated insects.

Regardless of method, he resolved to put an end to this disruption of his psyche, this straying from his path-- before he allowed her to end the self he knew. For this strange passion he felt was unbearable, and he feared having the mind he’d cultivated so well through the years pulled apart by Dionysian madness, by pure emotion, craven instinct and white light. Was this his final destination in his pursuit of infinite knowledge? To have it wiped out by some mindless torrent of turbulence and song?

He imagined himself growing old and withering away in that lonesome, dusty room, resigned to ignorant stagnation and giving up his dreams of infinity, knowing that at the critical moment he had turned away. Even now, though he was not even nearing middle-age, his stringy black hair was already greying, his sallow face hollowed and lugubrious; but his heavy, beaded eyes still inflamed with a seething vitality that seemed to drain that very source of life from his pallid physical form.

Just as he felt the gentle turn of the full moon loosen his tight gaze above the city square, his eyes caught a stirring in the crowd, a purposeful stride among the meandering figures beneath him. The figure seemed to keep its head down, finding its way towards something in the night by sense alone, not stopping to look at where it was. The silhouette took on an ethereal quality by the character of its stride and the colorful cloak which followed behind, thrown over the back of the wind like a trail of stars. Like a poor, buzzing creature approaches a window towards light, so fate hung in the air like a trap. If this was the dancing girl… it would be his chance to punish her for disturbing the sanctity of the cathedral, for her blasphemy, and put an end to this overwhelming feeling. To look her in the eyes once more. But with these eyes?

He must have simply been going mad from all this bargaining for direction, for how could he be moved so, to pursue some stranger that did not bear even her shape? 

But as the figure approached the light of the square, the clump of shadows revealed its form; he saw that it was not the upright treading of a human that had caught his eye, but a delicate four legged creature, and the dappled cloak that followed was in fact the fur that trailed down its back. It was a small goat, moving elegantly down the square and disappearing beneath him, down the shadow of the cathedral. 

How unfathomably odd that this forest creature would wander so deep into the city, and yet the monk was not at all surprised by its sudden appearance; he felt that tonight the weakening of his faith somehow had torn open a portal through which strange and frightening creatures, like the gypsy girl, manifested in the city square-- or perhaps every night conjured such curiosities and he had simply never been privy to observe them until now. Frollo felt compelled to follow it; what had guided it here, as if by an unseen trail, towards the cathedral? 

He glanced for a moment back at his room, but the sight met him with disdain. As if an animal himself, he felt the study and all it promised losing its grip on him; it would not help him now. When the sun fell away, it had left the universe open, its hidden shapes naked and revealed to his scrutiny. As the unity of the sun had scattered its reign away to a disbursement of distant stars, it left his senses alive, at the expense of rationality and the sureness of vision-- allowing instead the mind's eye to cast upon the earth its own hidden shapes from within. Abstract questions became a stirring in his bones; the time for musing would come with the dawn. 

Frollo threw a cloak over his cassock, pulling the hood over his face. He did not want anyone to stop him, to question him, or see the longing ache in his eyes the way the gypsy had; he wanted to lose his face just as the sky had lost its pattern. With this face covered, he could be eternal; ageless, nameless, a creature of the night. Only then would he allow himself to hunt along the footsteps of this enchanted beast.

As he fumbled down the staircase, it suddenly seemed alien to him, though he had crossed through this place a thousand times before. Now, he shivered at the sight; dark steps winding to infinity, each one becoming less visible than the last; doors on every side he turned. As he sank further down the narrow hall, he heard a beating of hooves on stone, echoing from somewhere in the darkness beneath him. 

He descended frantically now, feeling for the first time the quiet breath of lives stirring behind each door, passing each one just as he was met with another. But Frollo was blind to where his candlelight did not reach, and his more ancient senses took their place. He was alerted of an echo falling towards the base of the cathedral; then running, sweating like a madman, the monk hit ground level, just in time to catch the shadow of the goat leaping behind a corner. 

His eyes met the high-flying buttresses arcing over him, cold and unyielding to the slippery spell which circled the skipping goat. From outside, the cathedral looked as if it were carved from the marble of a distant moon, a hallucinatory liquid falling into geometric rhythms, once hardened by the sun, now crawling faintly in the darkness. He imagined it returning to that liquid state, and he swore that his eyes caught the glimmer of a pulse run through its rippling walls. Its formidable silhouette was cast with a pantheon of armoured saints, which appeared to guard its inner walls with a symmetrical intricacy both solar and logical, decadent and symmetrical. The painted alcoves which adorned each vaulted door now shown with a bewildering inner vibrancy, not unlike those images that found him when he closed his eyes at the end of a fasting spell, when his senses were opened and hungry.

Careful to keep his face covered, he followed in pursuit of the goat, rearing slowly down a path outside the cathedral he had rarely, if ever, ventured to. The creature paused before what looked like a sliver of darkness, leading down to the sewers; before Frollo could catch his breath, it had slipped through the bars and down under the cathedral.

Frollo stopped breathlessly for a moment, considering his choice. He remembered the dancing daughter of Egypt, her eyes filled with contempt , mocking his devotion to a fading ideal, content as it were with a candle to light his little world and a play of shadows as his reality. He hated her, he hated that her face was more exciting when disjointed by that look of smug, mock pity. It was a look which invited him to turn his back on what he knew, his cave of shallow wonders, and taste the air of true reality — there, in her dark, summery world — so far from where he intended to find it.

Moving more determinedly, Frollo crawled through the crack without resistance and scraped the smooth, wet marble as he slid down, his feet hitting the floor of a surprisingly spacious passage. Again, the monk was met with a telltale beating of hooves ; the creature was still nearby. 

As he turned down what seemed to be the only path inwards, the last shimmer of moonlight passed into the darkness as he caught a fleeting glimpse of the walls that enclosed him. The underground hall stretched long and foreboding like the intestines of a beast, its walls lined with skulls and the tombs of former monks, fading inscriptions clawed over by generations of rats. 

Realizing he had entered the cathedral’s catacombs, Frollo walked more stiffly now, the echo of the goat’s hooves, close ahead, his only compass under layers of tightly crushed bone. As he turned down each of the halls, he was disturbed by a creeping sense of familiarity — he had passed through these rooms before, countless times had seen their shape — but they had not looked like this, not at all. Yet somehow he knew his way. 

As he walked on in the tremulous gloom, the faint echo of the goat’s feet was the only sound through the halls miles beneath the earth, in rooms where Time seemed to lose all sense now. How long he had been down there, following blindly through the darkness, he could not tell. It must have been hours — no, mere minutes! — the longer he crawled through those tunnels, the more narrow they became, until he crawled on his knees with the skittering shadows pressed against him.

He must have been reaching the end; the smell, once wretched to him with its unmistakable reek of decay, had become slowly like a sultry incense, biting his nose pleasantly. He now breathed freely, immured in the intoxicating fumes which slackened his resistance. Only when he was loosening his grip on the goat’s whereabouts did he suddenly find his skin illuminated by an amber-red glow, deepened by the sound of a diabolical drum, bubbling darkly around him like swelling recesses of ripening honey. He saw the passageway had split in sunder as he moved towards it, revealing a small opening from which the bright ribbons of light curled through, rising from beneath the floorboards in colorful spasms of vermillion sound in the mute blackness. 

As he crawled on, he recognized a corridor he had passed through innumerable times- it was the stairwell which ascended towards his very room, now sloping eerily downwards towards his cellar door- like a reversed mirror image. In that dim sepulchre, a terrifying thought dawned on him, quivering against the damp air like his candle in the oily darkness. 

He was, in some sense, inside another subterranean cathedral, Notre Dame’s double- blind, low and still; just under the upper nave which was overflowing with light and resounding with organs and bells day and night. Instead, here there seemed to be an ominously growing sound of drums which vibrated the ground more heavily with each gaining step. 

The cellars of an edifice formed another edifice, into which he would descend through instead of ascend, and which extend its subterranean grounds under the external pillars of the cathedral, like mountains which are reversed in the mirror-like waters of a lake, suspended into the vacuous world beneath. There seemed to be a second cathedral, reversed in pattern but identical to the one on its surface. 

Frollo was whisked from this realization as he caught sight of the goat again- its silhouette pressing darkly against the reddening entrance- just in time to watch it sink into the richly saturated color which enclosed its body like a liquid in the spiced air. Frollo moved into the opening, caught in the loosely wound ties of warm breath which seemed to resonate from its cavernous walls. He was drawn this time to the goat's footsteps not as a hunter, but as a follower, and the creature his guide. But the goat paused a step ahead of him. 

As he entered the cavernous hall, it was then that Frollo found himself utterly a stranger to the feast of sights he beheld.

The labyrinth, stretching ceaselessly before him, mirrored the colossal main hall of the cathedral’s entrance; except instead of white light streaming from stained glass windows over monks and townspeople kneeling before an altar, his vision was obscured by a darkened, red-lit scene that recalled a moonlit cave rather than a chapel. 

Mysterious revelers crooned in an ancient tongue with no predetermined rhythm, while Indian strings could be felt throughout the ground beneath them. Glowing firelight cavorted upon the high ceiling, casting spinning shadows of the entranced inhabitants who dipped and swayed in the primordial darkness, their eyes glazed and their heads thrown back, dancing to the pulsating beat of a drum which stirred their blood to ecstasy. They appeared as silhouettes, the details of their individual features obscured by a thick purple fog that swam through the air to sheathe them. Their indistinct shapes twirled in and out of shadows, seemingly dissolved and then reborn as they stepped out from behind the bonfire, unrecognizable. 

Following the crowd of figures before him with spastic twitches of his eyes, Frollo discovered that the dancers did not seem entirely human, but instead half beast. They were naked except for drapes of leopard furs that adorned their fluid, ivy-wrapped forms, many of which glistened with a thick red liquid that stained their bare skin and pomegranate mouths. 

Catching glimpses of their faces, he saw that they wore decorative masks over coarse, feral hair and laurel crowns, and while each mask was different from the last, they all appeared to him as one face scattered into many frenzied forms. He felt that behind each mask flowed the same reservoir of untamed passion, a formless spirit who existed independently while also occupying a space within each reveler he witnessed before him. It was the nameless beast-God within, entering and possessing that which was already its own, ordaining each of them with a divine, ineffable sense of power.

Frollo was reminded of that room, which felt like leagues above this Chthonic sea where he was now submerged, the sunlit chapel where he once felt a clarifying, guiding light shine from a place that already existed within him. There, each silent, kneeling man felt the same pure light filtering through him that tethered each of them unwittingly to their neighbor. Transcending the corporeal world but keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground, Frollo had many times before felt himself possessed by the holy spirit. But this was a different creature, familiar but terrifyingly incomprehensible, which had always trembled at the blurry black edges of his mind; it now began to claw its way out from the depths of its twilight cavern. 

Before now, that snarling, starved beast had been tightly entombed within the belly of a whale at the bottom of Frollo’s unconscious mind. Its emergence, however subtle, filled his blood with a sweet electricity, and his next heartbeat sent a jolt of ecstasy throughout his whole body, its lingering reverberations echoing a dreamy, narcotic reverie. 

His sallow skin, which had always been cold and passionless to the touch, now felt inflamed, impregnated with hot blood. This brief intoxication recovered in him an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he suddenly found the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination, for the first time, felt liberated from his prison of ascetic guilt.

He began to lose the sense of where his skin ended and the air began; the tepid heat of the room was like being enclosed in glowing red rings of tightening flesh. The metaphysical and the linear workings of logic ended their boundaries and flooded together, working in complex efficiency to the likeness and order of some nightmarish design. Like the gypsy's song, his words, his prayers, did not take flight to heaven, but were given flesh on earth, while leaving their mark on his.

Candles melted into each other in the long stretch of time he spent lost in the madness around him. He felt as if he'd been thrown off a proud, steady horse only to watch it be devoured beneath him; a white-mained, fine-muscled creature twisting, bulging-eyed, falling limp under the seizing grip of a pummeling snake of flame. All sense of self-consciousness had been thrown into the frenzied bonfire, burning quickly away without much struggle. Figures sputter and contort orgiastically all round its surface, as if drawn to its mind-whitening core. Their skin is made black against the fire and lit from behind by gilded rims of flame, melting into deep hues of inviting green smoke which curl around their bare, dancing feet.

A filthy, soot-black moisture began to collect on Frollo's own skin, causing his hair to stick to his face in greased strings. Teeth chattering, he screwed his eyes to stare, to inhale fanatically, towards his surroundings; at the wine-red revelry which gave with horrifying abundance to all who had a taste for its bitter fruits. 

Frollo moved like a wanton stranger towards the table in the center of the hall. The length of its surface was sagging under its load of grapes, wine, and a strange, bloody meat which oozed a fluorescent red in the shadowy hall. Inches away, tied by the neck around a loosening stake, was a partially starved dog. 

The hunger-crazed creature was half choking from relentlessly tugging its thin body towards the dripping, voluptuous flesh just out of its reach. As the feast raged on, the rope gradually loosened its grip; and the snarling, rabid dog watched the sadistic revelers stuff themselves with raw flesh before shoving bloody fingers down their throats to make room for more. Finally, when the dog was unleashed upon the drunken revelers, who seemed to have become even more animal than human, the table was toppled over and Frollo glimpsed the dog hunched over the plump torso of a man. Whether this had been a coordinated facet of the feast’s progression or simply a consequence of its chaos, he could not know. 

The passionate expression of the revelers seated at the inverted feast suddenly changed as they held their hands to their hearts and seemed to mirror its rhythm all throughout their bodies. It was as if there were tiny holes of light submerged in their chests; pulsating, shrinking windows to a greater mind. A mind which grew outwards from between them with exponential progression, rising from the fertile space in the center, which the dancers cultivated by the intertwining vibrations of their movements. Like a bursting welt beginning to run, Frollo felt like collapsing to the invisible presence which was rising out of dust into consciousness from the winding dance of growing rings which spiraled towards a greater complexity of its own. 

He could sense now through their expressions that the dancers were no longer creating the presence of the Other, but reacting to it, losing themselves to it; the circle enlivened by feeding away the dancer’s own sense of separateness. Now, the revelers were possessed with an unfamiliar divinity that bound a kind of Otherness to the flesh of its subjects in a strange invocation of mind into matter. 

It was in this entranced moment that Frollo saw the goat behind him leap into the whirlpool of figures in the center of the hall, blending easily among the satyr-like crowd. It stopped only to twirl around the rhythmic swaying of a familiar but masked woman; it was the gypsy girl, the wicked source of his unholy transformation. Her hair, close and curled, seemed ready to shudder in sunder and divide into snakes. Upon seeing her, he suddenly became aware of his individual presence in the room, and frantically checked to see that his hood still concealed his face. 

It was not the revelation of her skin which roused him so deeply, but the frivolousness by which it was shown. It was the drunken cheek and capricious twirl of the frilled, swaying petticoat which seized around the legs of the maiden as she spun; while its host twists herself free, it may or may not unfurl to the upper inch of her thighs and allow them to taste the air. 

The electric hair trailing each movement looked as though it would hiss and glitter in sparks if once touched, and was wound into a tuft with serpentine plaits and involutions, a helix-like emblem of feminine evil. The ends of her hair scintillated faintly as if alive — tiny nerve endings quivering out to intertwine themselves into the fibers of his own flesh — while the rest of their length is caged and plaited in gold to the likeness of a chrysalid serpent: spiked, waved and rounded. At once his heart felt red and tender as a bruise; dark and pungent like a rose opening its crimson bed to be feasted on by worms.

_ O Rose, thou art sick,  _ he mused bitterly to himself.

__ He pursued her, more confident now that his face was well concealed, and joined the circle of dancers to stand tentatively behind her. Watching their movements, he clumsily harmonized with them, though still a walled island afloat on a sea of synchronized movement, he was determined that his foreign mind would not break the progression of the emergent presence which was now sharing itself within the dancers. But still, he needed to be near her in order to lure and trap her — but to do so he must not be sensed for what he is — a sinister stranger penetrating their circle of invocation.

Just as he could feel himself finally being enclosed by the hypnotic shrinking and unraveling of the circle they had formed, the music changed without warning and the inner circle turned to face the ring of dancers behind them. The fearful chill of gold conmingled with the slickness of his sweat as Petrarch heard the shimmer of a necklace swing against his heaving chest- his senses adored in every jeweled facet, linking in a chain that seemed to twinkle and sway for his sole delight. But the spasm of radiant panic that the sight of the chains gave way to only mounted as he found each link climbed towards the face of a familiar stranger-- the gypsy woman he had followed to the depths. 

The flame behind them seemed to wane, sputter and die with each passing rotation. The ebb and flow of strange music quivered through the jewels like scintillating scales that swung hypnotically between her breasts--- from her tawny skin emerged a proud rogue color warmed by the sighing embers that drifted to rest on the air around them. Even through the gauze of his mask he made out those heavy lidded eyes which were cradled by her cheekbones, turning inwards like a falling curve on the bout of a violin. But the harmony of her face had been distorted; masking her nose and mouth was a toothed beak which was wound to a head-dress that finished behind her neck in a great flourish of amber-tipped feathers. 

He had never been so close to her-- though her face was hidden, she seemed to gaze at him from underneath his shroud, rather than her own. With subdued horror, he wondered if perhaps she was really there with him— under the shroud— and was beginning to latch onto that place where his eyes fed the world to his head, hungrily pulling them inward to alter his perception. 

A sudden, fitful laughter contorted her face, throwing to the wind a flurry of embers which his lust approached with the zeal of a martyr condemned. She threw her head back as the organ tones of disjointed laughter roared through the halls of her seizing chest, drawing from her mouth a warm, virulent smile. The shrouded monk winced as if staring directly into a radiant hole of nervous light; her face appeared to be made from the lines of an image traced over a thousand times, her features encoded painfully into his brain. 

As they danced, she drew him ever closer, allowing the jewels to orchestrate their mocking sound as they danced across her chest. He imagined each faint ring of movement held the scattered choirs of angels, pieces of them captive in each jeweled prison and half-freed by the metallic hum of the gems as they glided across her skin. One moment, the voices would swell to their glass surfaces, swinging away from their captor as if grasping for momentary escape-- only to be thrown back against the warm, drumming prison of the gypsy’s neck. As he watched his heretic love swing into the torch-light, each color of her elaborate necklace seemed to stir awake, its jewels beginning to glow infernally as if infused with holy light, swiped off some star of heaven. The geometric shards of glass dripped about the bones of her neck like the scattered rains of fertile eden cooling across the blushing furnace of her breast, or choruses of Sephardic incantations suspended in motion. If the fluorescent droplets she wore had been the half-formed plea of some holier creature, then its watery, larval fragments had been hardened impatiently to ice and flung carelessly around her neck to make the words; 

“Exiled from all lands, and without a home I wander, 

___To haunt a thousand worlds and call not one my own;_ _ _

____never to become and always to end_ _ _ _

____the grass flows away from my path, the oceans from my touch__ _ _

____so I ask to take from your bed,_ _ _ _

____a heavy sleep without dreams;_ _ _ _

____to taste of that zero you have loved better than the dead” _.__ _ _ _

_____ _

_____ _

Once again the monk had died away from his purpose to revel instead in the hypnotic spell of the jeweled chambers about the gypsy’s neck, and the splendours of the hall he found reflected in them. For a moment, all notions of capturing the provoking siren had been subducted under the roaring organ-tones of light which suddenly rushed forth from the stained windows of the ambulatory. The figures illuminated within the panes of glass were not brought to light by the sun like their doubles on the surface, nor did they look out into the surrounding city. Instead they sat like eyes turned inwards, cryptic scenes ignited in their surface by a flourish of fires which ran along the cracks of the walls like veins of fluorescent glue, inflaming each brick with the charge of a living nervous system.  He reveled, too, in the plates of gold which mounted her head upon her shoulders, presented like an ornament and held triumphantly in place by a steel-ringed spine which encased the edges of her skull in a second metal skin. Swimming in its armored surface were stranded echoes of light and sound which must have crossed over from the borders of some distant land. Words seemed to fall in and out of each vibration from the metal cages of silver and gold which released a thin, wiry voice that swung low beneath her legs to address him directly; 

_“A fly you have become, so pale, undone;  
by a shroud which haunts a fear of sleep;  
Rest now into careful swoons of sonorous light;  
Watched by the calculating sun, who knows not what he shines._

__

__

_See now his children, stained by their laughter,  
Inheritors of riches, evil in their innocence,  
Wearing only his stolen color, to dance in spite  
across his subtle rays of freely given light. ___

____

____

_Do you know our great pretender,  
Or have your travels left our lands unscoured,  
Where infinity grows from seeds unplanned  
and eternity in the hours? ___

____

____

_Rest hereafter, sleep forever  
In our realm of borrowed sand"_

__

The monk began to stumble in his dance, losing his footing under the sinking load of his brain which tilted precariously against the skin of his head and threatened to pour out the sides of his ears. That silvery voice seemed to be describing the revelers which surrounded him from all sides, with their stolen parade of colors-- of greys and greens catching the sun’s light to accelerate its subtle shine to unnatural hues, stepping across its very surface without a care for its worth.   
Pausing, Petrarch kneeled to cool his burning lips against her hand, catching sight of the caged petticoat which wound about her legs like a trap that hides some coveted treasure. From his place on the floor, he could almost catch the tunneling frills of undergarments unfolding beneath her dress like a squalid rose.  


The glance had not escaped her sight, and she leaned in to respond with a low whisper; this time with the wires of her throat, rather than the caged wires of her dress, 

“Of the men I’ve opened my legs for, all have abandoned life for a taste of the power that runs and coils between them...” He could feel her lips near the entrance to his ear, her warm whisper drifting through the tunnels of his head, “In fact, they all seem to have died long-suffering deaths…” 

Tensely, he watched the space between them beginning to shrink. 

“An unfortunate coincidence, don’t you think? Just think of King Midas, who went mad in his lust for gold-- died of some fever of the soul…bleeding out while clutching all his most prized possessions to his chest, save for one, of course...” 

The monk gasped as he stood out from what he had thought was a sun-warmed piece of wet earth to find himself amidst a pile of blood and gold. 

“No matter how tightly he might’ve held onto them, he can’t take them with him, not where he’s going…” 

The metallic scent of blood caught the shimmer of gold in its reflective surface, and the toxic fumes of both seemed to quicken the spinning of the room as the monk eased himself back towards the ground. His rigid muscles began to relax carefully into the sumptuous warmth of the blood, cooling his burning face against the cold bitter glow of gold, the minerals of each substance running together indistinctly like heaven flows through the skin of the earth. 

“Blood and gold, two things that make the world go round, eh?” She chuckled as she unearthed a pile of bloodied coins, letting them slide through her fingers to sift back into the shivering gash of metals now stained brilliantly red. 

His face had been turned away in shame, but he now looked up at her, his heavy-lidded eyes searching her gaze. The monk allowed his pale tongue to slither from his mouth to taste a drop of blood that had landed just below his lip. 

“I'd rather drink the spittle from your mouth, than blood or gold, wine, or opium; your scornful laughs are like sighs of ambrosia to me. Why? In the dark of the night you trouble my rest, and yet I seek you out to further receive your infection to me. Why, why can’t I kill you within me? Am I not worthy to receive the freedom I desire? I’d kill you without a second thought, but at once I’d seek to revive again, the soul within the body of this creature I loathe!” 

As he spoke, the gypsy woman, in all her smug divinity-- appeared taken aback by the strange confession and took a broad step away from him. The petty mischief that had tightened her face a moment before was replaced by a look of puzzled innocence. At the sight of her troubled face, glowing softly still, he felt a tepid warmth constrict his chest and send his torment to even greater heights. 

The monk suddenly moved as if possessed, his blood humming white noise in his ears, anxious to ease himself against the heady warmth of her skin. With the urgency of a liar on the verge of discovery, he pulled at the loose sleeves of her dress to draw her close to him. “To see the body that burns you, the tender flesh which palpitates and blushes under the spell of so vibrant a life as yours, so potent a breath…” He pushed his hips into the green silk draped over her wriggling form, feeling the sting of a pleasure that was not his to know. 

“To see it but not to touch it, to think of it but not to feel it…” His voice struggled out as she moved swiftly from his grasp, “don’t you see what a misery that is?” Catching the side of her face, he felt her breath slow against the cold surface of his palm. 

Noticing how she cringed at his touch, he felt a pain rivaling joy in its lingering burn-- and while he watched her sweet mouth twist in disgust, a self-contained bitterness flooded to the edges of his teeth. “Do I trouble you? You seed of hell, festering in my paradise? You infernal angel, who’s song has dragged me to the borders of reason-- Is it I who troubles you? Is it you then, who grits your teeth and turns away, unable to bear the burn of my touch? Your touch has destroyed me! Your touch has ruined me! And yet you never touched me at all! The tilt of your voice, the sweeping turns of your dance has unraveled even my most devoted soul…” He pressed the side of his cheek to hers, his voice a low whisper behind his tightening jaw. She grabbed him by the chin, lowering his face to look him in the eyes. “Devoted soul? Saint of all saints, hm? What brings you to a place like this, O humble acolyte, O slave of slaves?” 

“You have! Your witchcraft has brought me here, dragged me to the depths! Now cure me, I implore you! Your beauty, grotesque in its extravagance, morbid in its vanity-- has worked a kind of poison into me... now I must have my cure… O, rotten cure!” 

He took her arm, burying his face in the rolling hills of her shoulders; suffused as they were with a wash of rose-gold, like burning sands across them, and closed his lips around the dips and curves of her arms as if to catch the stirrings of some antidote beneath them. Or perhaps a city, buried in her sands-- some nectar held in the hollowed palace and ruins of her bones. But he found nothing save for the gnawing flash of that poison, empty, leaping, as it burned itself to vapors in its hopeless reach. 

“What cure can there be? You’ve opened my pale, unripe heart-- made it red and tender as a rose, only to have it descended on by maggots… Your song is the worm that eats away the center, sweetened though it was by your limble voice… So tender now that it cannot hold, so undone that its petals fall and fall away…to let go of them all, to be devoured, yes, that would be the cure…” 

Suddenly, she reached out and tore back the shroud which covered his face, silencing the mutterings spun from his reverie. He saw at last the full radiancy of her cruel smile, and the revelers all paused to look upon the face of the stranger. The music seemed to shiver to a halt in the dim moments that followed. 

“Look upon the face of this saint, none other than a man of the cloth who descended every step in the towers and heights of Notre Dame to feast with us tonight... and praise your new King of Fools!” 

**Author's Note:**

> I plan to finish this at some point. Either way, I congratulate anyone who's gotten this far lol. I tried writing in a style similar to the original book; that is, very detailed and long-winded. Also, the Frollo in this story is the Frollo from the Victor Hugo novel, so he's dabbled in stuff like alchemy, is younger and is a monk instead of a judge. Parts of this story will also not follow the canon of the book though, I'm really just having fun with it. This fic also uses a few direct quotes from Faust by Goethe and the Corpus Hermeticum by Hermes Trismegistus.


End file.
